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Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
- deusum 5y agoBack then we were moving a terabyte a week on one Hotline Server alone. Napster was already way way more popular (and accessible).
- jonstewart 5y agoAh, Hotline… 1998…
- iJohnDoe 5y agoFond memories of Hotline too. Is there a replacement or equivalent for Hotline today?
- peterburkimsher 5y agoI'd forgotten Hotline (I was only 8 years old in 1998 and never used it) but the logo looked familiar. GLoarbLine PhareRouge seems to run on Mac OS 10.13.6, but I don't know any IP addresses to connect to. https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients The closest spiritual successor, I suppose, would be SoulSeek.
- jonpurdy 5y agoDon’t forget Carracho, a Mac specific Hotline replacement.
- amatecha 5y agoHotline is still around. There's also KDX. You can get clients here[0]. Hit the default tracker (hltracker.com) to find servers :) [0] https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php
- 0des 5y agoMany times i've dabbled with recreating it, but with a more modern approach. Is anybody out there also interested in this?
- romanhn 5y agoCurious if any P2P networks existed before Hotline. I recall using it briefly before Napster burst onto the scene, and always considered it to be the pioneer.
- amatecha 5y agoI'm so happy to see so many people mention Hotline in here! Aahhh the good ol' days :) Indeed, when Napster came along, it wasn't too surprising to me .. that is, other than the true p2p nature of it, rather than server/client/tracker. That was indeed awesome. But there was also a bit less accountability so you got a lot of sketchy/crappy stuff, whereas hl servers (and users) had somewhat of a reputation to uphold (IMO).
- cblconfederate 5y agoAh yeah. I thought that today everyone would run their own hotline server. Instead we have facebook
- Svperstar 5y agoI tried really hard to get into Hotline, I still remember the "welcome to Hotline" girl. Every hotline server I tried was either terrible or so full it was impossible to connect or use. Never had a good experience with it. Guess I wasn't in the loop enough.
- codegeek 5y agoYes piracy is bad and all but as a college student, Napster was such as life saver. You could literally download any song you wanted to listen to. I also remember another application called Kazaa that was popular as well (circa 2000-2002ish)
- umvi 5y agoAnd Limewire. I remember using Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro
- peterburkimsher 5y agoOn Windows, Audiogalaxy. And on Mac, Poisoned! With support for FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella (Limewire), OpenFT, OpenNap, and eMule. But dial-up was too slow, so it was usually quicker to repair a friend's iPod and make a backup using iPodRip or Senuti.
- marcodiego 5y agoI think audiogalaxy was the real pioneer in p2p. Audiogalaxy satellite, IIRC, ran an ftp server on your machine while at the same time indexed your files and sent the list to audiogalaxy, the web service. From there, anyone could search for mp3 and download from users currently on-line. It was the begining. It soon became very clear the problems of centralization for this purpose, decentralized networks thrived. Most proprietary implementation eventually died. The open ones, emule and gnutella2, although a small shadow of what they were, are still alive. In the meantime bittorrent evolved and the industry had to bow to streaming services. But, if anyone still wants to "fell the napster taste", the closest I know today is soulseek. There's a good client, called nicotine+, that works very well last time I tried.
- indigodaddy 5y agoI remember Audiogalaxy, but cannot remember if it was before, after or basically concurrent with Napster..? Guess couldn’t have been before because Napster was the first right?
- barney54 5y agoThose were glorious days. To go from buying CDs to being able to find and download almost any song you could think of was amazing. I loved the ability to discover artists I didn’t know about by looking through people’s collections. Such a great discovery feature. It was all illegal, but it just an amazing time.
- PebblesRox 5y agoReminds me of the time I saw a bookshelf in the bedroom of my brother's friend. Half were books I loved and half were books I'd never heard of. I got some new favorite authors out of that discovery :)
- iszomer 5y agoRemember the days of Wrapster?
- chihuahua 5y agoThose were exciting times. I had dialup internet access back then. I spent a day hanging out with a friend who had a cable modem, downloading music all day long.
- kace91 5y agoThere was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information. In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. Perhaps it was just the jump from scarce physical media to digital abundance. Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate, rather than stumbling on information by accident. Perhaps it's just nostalgia... but I feel we've lost something on the way, that we should have kept for the next generation.
- ianlevesque 5y agoArguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.
- grensley 5y ago"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company. Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks. Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65). I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
- iJohnDoe 5y agoI was like, “Is Napster still a thing?” Then I saw 2000.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoNapster is still a thing as a brand, it's what RealNetworks' Rhapsody streaming service was renamed to when it was spun out of Real. It's just another streaming service now, but I don't know anyone who uses it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoOh God. Anyone remember "Napster Bad"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI was working in IT at a large British university when Spotify launched, and we had to block certain ports because early versions of Spotify used a peer to peer swarm to reduce the load on their servers, and it was so popular with students that it was completely jamming up the network.
- 4lun 5y agoI remember hitting something like this in my student halls. Internet provider aggressively throttled any p2p traffic. I had to use a VPN to get Spotify to play smoothly and not repeatedly buffer when playing a song.
- sn_master 5y agoafaik Skype also was using peer-to-peer until Microsoft bought them.
- marcodiego 5y agoI wonder if Skype would have survived had they used an open protocol.
- gridder 5y agoNapster chat was pretty neat as well. Pure nostalgia
- steelframe 5y agoWhen I was an undergraduate student at a conservative university back circa 2001 I had the Napster binary in my home directory because I was curious about how it worked and was doing some packet analysis in my spare time. About halfway into the semester I tried logging into my account on a lab computer to do an assignment only to get an access denied. When I asked the lab assistant about it, he pulled up my info and then proceeded to lecture me on the spot about how bad I was for having that file. Note that I didn't have a single MP3 file on any school computers. "I see you have Napster. We scanned for Napster and disabled all the accounts that have it. Don't you know that stealing is wrong? You're totally in violation of school policy, are abusing our lab, and should be reported to the administration for disciplinary action. I guess I can re-enable your account if you promise to delete Napster right away." This same school freaked out when I wrote a buffer overflow lab for a computer security class. "We will NEVER teach students how to undermine the security of computer software in THIS department!!" This same lab assistant went on to accidentally delete everybody's home directory in the entire department with 3 weeks left in the semester (a failed attempt to write a script that correctly deletes core files from a cron job at 1:00 in the morning). And he also failed to make sure that backups were being done (they weren't).
- peterburkimsher 5y agoDo you now work in blockchain (a descendant of P2P) or cybersecurity? That would be the best vindication :)
- mcfedr 5y agoMaybe inspired to be a competent sysadmin
- searealist 5y agoThis has something to do with your university being conservative?
- madaxe_again 5y agoI’ve fond memories of repeatedly escaping punishment for breaking into the school’s network, because it was too embarrassing to them to admit that a 14 year old had owned them. Napster didn’t yet exist, so we were maintaining a huge (for the time) shared library of mp3s, VCDs, games, and all the rest - this proved extremely popular at boarding school, where they shut off the network and internet access at 8pm (or so they thought). We played cat and mouse for a while until we compromised the physical security of cabling, and started just splicing in, and at that point they realised they weren’t going to win. We eventually reached a détente, where I ran a shadow network and piracy hub between 8pm and 6am, and didn’t interfere with their operations, and they didn’t interfere with mine. By the sixth form, I was helping them harden their network, with the understanding that after I left they’d allow my successor to continue to run our parasitic network - which they did, until it was voluntarily wound down in the face of obsolescence.
- veg 5y agoNapster is one of the two or three products that spawned a completely different world, entirely tossing established and antiquated rules on their head. Of course, very directly, Spotify would not exist without Napster. But a step further, it opened the eyes to end-users about their collective power, and the beauty of distributed distribution. It was the first proof that "regular" users would buy into such a thing. Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.
- marcodiego 5y agoI think p2p was so successful that the music industry had to change. They had to be more convenient or would lose all the control on media distribution. Users of modern streaming services owe a lot to p2p users of early. Evidence: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/physical-vs-digital.png https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/...
- geoduck14 5y ago>Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof. You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
- interestica 5y agoMcMaster University, 2001. Ontario, Canada. The school took a novel approach to combat this. "Rez-x" was a file sharing system that was limited to the school's subnet. It didn't prevent you from using Napster, but by providing p2p access on the local (fast!) network, people just used it instead. So, rather than blocking the main pipe, they just gave a way more appealing local option (in a time where dialup was still somewhat common).
- Terr_ 5y agoBack in the day I remember tweaking and repackaging a Gnutella client which was preset to restricted its traffic to the university LAN. It didn't take off though: The first-mover advantage of "that one guy who runs a Direct Connect server which you can also chat on" was too strong. (I just disagreed with the centralization.)
- pope_meat 5y agoThe internet at the turn of the century was something special. What we have now, I don't know, feels inauthentic.
- kkodaxeroo 5y agoFacebook is now using Facebook News to publish positive uplifting articles about how Facebook is a force for good in the world! In other words, pure propaganda.
- kkodaxeroo 5y agoProject Amplify. https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-is-using-news-feed-to-promote-favorable-stories-about-itself-nyt-reports/ https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-is-using-news-feed-to-promo...
- eterpstra 5y agoI don't know why this is #1 on HN right now, but i just came here to say I was a sophomore at ISU in 2000. Go Cyclones.
- Borrible 5y ago'Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from. I've got electric light. And I've got second sight. And amazing powers of observation.' from: Nobody Home, The Wall 1979 by Pink Floyd And today even less home with even more shit.
- jedberg 5y agoUC Berkeley used packet shaping to make Napster slow as molasses if you were downloading from someone outside the UC network (or Stanford because we had a direct connection to them). So you basically kept retrying till you found someone who was on a UC network connection and then noted their username so you could hit them up again next time.
- Scoundreller 5y agoNow those vendors that perfected traffic shaping for university p2p control sell the tech to oppressive regimes. Win win! https://masaar.net/en/sandvine-the-surveillance-octopus-in-the-arab-region/ https://masaar.net/en/sandvine-the-surveillance-octopus-in-t...
- ianai 5y agoI wonder if this was posted to suggest a path out of the current toxic social media.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sorenjan 5y agoIf it weren't for Napster and DC++, I would've bought a Minidisc player instead of an iPod.
- musesum 5y agoOne private study on a campus network found that the distribution of titles followed a power law. A handful of songs capturing most of the volume, and then hundreds of songs with only 1 or 2 shares. It was perplexing to find a business model that could support independant artists.
- mdturnerphys 5y agoI have one memory of Napster. My senior year of HS, 2000-2001, one of my teachers told me I could skip an assignment in exchange for helping her install it on her (school-owned) computer. It would make a better story if the class was Ethics, but it was pretty close--World Religions.
- eredengrin 5y agoI love the layers of irony here...The natural assumption to make here is it would be ironic for an ethics teacher to be using napster, but in fact the real irony (imo) is that it is in fact a very interesting ethical question when it comes to pirating. Not something I intend to discuss here but it is something interesting I think about semi-frequently.
- poulsbohemian 5y agoI vaguely recall there was some kind of chat built in to Napster and it was the era when people did sometimes turn off their computers and/or where in some countries they paid by the minute for internet. I recall getting a message from a German on the other side of the world that I was able to read and respond to because I just happen to speak German letting me know he was headed to bed but that he'd leave his computer on so I could finish grabbing my files. Those are the kind of quirky interactions I miss about the good old days. Likewise, the chats and email exchanges in the early 90s before this web thing came along. There were relatively few people on the internet, so the signal to noise was strong and it was easy to connect with experts.
- no_time 5y agoμTorrent had(has?) a chat feature as well. Quite sad that on public trackers like mininova it was basically the place where everyone would write SEED PLS and not much else.
- mpol 5y agoAh, yes, chatting on Napster :) It was just IRC with DC, while the GUI was mostly built around the DC. I was sharing some music from the early times of classic heavy metal, the NWOBHM. A compilation album done by Lars Ulrich with the songs that had inspired him. One day I received a message from someone in England. He was very surprised to find a song from the band of his brother-in-law on napster. He had always thought it was a band that had amounted to nothing. A week later I chatted with the bass player or drummer (I forgot) where he talked about the band. They felt forced to either go commercial, like Def Leppard, or go thougher, like trash metal from the US. The band was divided and that is where it ended. I forgot the name of the band. The album is now even on wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Metal_%2779_Revisited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Meta... By the way I was using a console client for linux, nap.c. Does anyone remenber that? I ran it on my 486 pc on a console. Just like virtual tty's it had virtual screens built in with search, shares, chat, etcetera.
- kkodaxeroo 5y agoAnd here you are on Hacker News, chatting with thousands of the smartest people in the world. This is the kind of quirky interaction you should be enjoying Right Now.
- bitwize 5y agoWhippersnappers! I remember the post to the homepage of the emulation group Damaged Cybernetics, that said "We are investigating the use of MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy." I witnessed the dawn of the MP3 as a piracy tool and hence a cultural phenomenon. Without that post, there would be no Apple Music, no iTunes, no iPod, no Napster, none of it.
- davidmr 5y agoMany long years ago now in a past life, I was a network security guy for a big research university. Overall, that was a pretty fun job: universities make for a target rich environment. The downside was we that we were responsible for handling DMCA complaints to the university (this was a relatively new law and p2p sharing was just starting to become mainstream). We'd take the complaint, check the netflow logs to verify that the IP in question really was running file sharing software at the same time, turn off the Ethernet port, report them to the Dean of Students, turn them back on after the deans talked to them, etc., etc. My boss at the time was sick of doing the RIAA's dirty work for them (back then the RIAA was way more vigorous about enforcement than the MPAA. I don't remember why). So he decided that we were going to make a web site to give step-by-step instructions with screenshots to show how to disable file uploading in every p2p client available. We didn't care what the kids were downloading because the DMCA complaints only came in from uploads. Fast-forward a year or so and the site is pretty popular. We'd get asked by at least one or two other universities a week if they could copy our instructions locally for their students. Being a university, of course we would encourage it and only ask for attribution for the copyrighted text and images. Every now and then, I'd Google around and see who was using our instructions, and one day I noticed a .com show up in the results, which was unusual. I don't remember what the name of the site was, but it was some site trying to convince people that copyright infringement is bad and the music industry really are the good guys, etc. I know for sure we didn't get any requests from anyone like that, so I did some digging. The site didn't have a DMCA contact listed (as required), so it took some serious digging to find out who really owned the site. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, it was owned and operated by none other than the Recording Industry Association of America. They had stolen the entire site, text, screenshots and all, removed our copyright information, and rebranded the pages, claiming the work as their own. I dug through my email to find the most recent takedown notice they had sent us, changed all the names to reflect the current situation and fired it off to the RIAA's General Counsel. About 10m later, I got a phone call from a very concerned attorney. I genuinely couldn't stop laughing as he was talking, so I referred the matter to our attorneys and thought no more of it. It sucks to know that your career has peaked so early. It's all been downhill from there.
- martyvis 5y agoBack in the early 2000s we were consulting to a lot of universities and other organisations seeking solutions for this. We were helping them deploy middle boxes such as those from Packetshaper, F5 and the like. And because universities had a "no censorship" expectation from academics and students, what the IT administrators liked was the ability to detect and shape the traffic that was considered hogging bandwidth needlessly. That way they weren't blocking Napster, LimeWire, and the like but just slowing it down so that miscreants went home and used their own ISP connection rather than the organisation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y agoI wonder when the current digital behemoths will be disrupted by pirates again
- hnrodey 5y agoCirca 2002, Penn State limited each on-campus student connection to (my memory is fuzzy so don't hold me to exact numbers) 1.5GB combined upload and download per week. But, anything transferred within the Penn State network did not count towards the cap. This is where I should say that Penn State has 12+ campuses spread throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania so we could transfer stuff between Erie, PA and State College, PA for no penalty. This lead to the rise of an internal Direct Connect network that allowed students to form our own internal file sharing network that was approximately functionally equivalent to Napster and the like. This also lead to the complete and total network saturation of some parts the dorms where we clearly had clusters of students trying to get their download on. It's just really hard to try to understand how people will respond to available incentives; not just here but in all areas of life.
- ipunchghosts 5y agoFuck I remember this!!!! There was dc hub off campus in 2003 because they had shut them down internally. It was a genius solution. The hub was dc.kicks-ass.net! You connected to this url to get the file lists and then no penalties to transfer the data in between dorms!
- vessel 5y agoWas this the birth of i2hub? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2hub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2hub I remember the first time I saw a file download faster than 80mbps was using i2hub. It was 4am and I remember thinking at the time "shit, I'm gonna get flagged" and sure enough my dorm internet was disconnected the next morning. Fun times.
- easytiger 5y agoI recall circa 1999? Tape recording a live performance of Britney Spears, "Hit Me Baby One More Time" from the Mark & Lard BBC radio 1 show by the UK indie band Travis. I later shared this on Napster after digitising from the phono in on my cyrix 333MHz PC. I often wonder if that exact MP3 file still exists somewhere
- crtasm 5y agoI can see a 128 mp3 that says it's from Radio1's Live Lounge, would that be it? or if that's a different show perhaps it got mistitled along the way.
- easytiger 5y agoYea i think that was the section of the show, they did it up till mid 2000s. Where are you seeing it?! They did do the song live a lot after that, but mine was from the first ever time they did it in public. I think mark and lard did high pitched harmonies in the background if memory serves
- crtasm 5y agoThere's a couple of people sharing it on soulseek.
- alberth 5y agoI was at college during this time. My roommate was downloading various Linux distributions and the campus IT department came to our room asking why we were using so much bandwidth and to please stop. I don’t recall Napster.com being an issue but P2P sharing sites (limewire etc) was definitely huge. And even bigger, was people setting up local file shares to allow fellow classmates to download files off your desktop. I think our entire campus ran off of a T3 line (45 Mbps) which was stupid fast back in the day to connect to public internet. Off topic: what ever happened to “Internet2”. There was a ton of talk about this back around this time.
- pc86 5y agoThis was just a bit before my time, but I was in early HS. I still remember being curious and looking up what it would cost to have a single T3 line installed, and it was tens of thousands of dollars.
- alberth 5y agoYou’re not alone. I did the same and recall the cost being similar to what you mentioned. Also brings back memories of movies like Swordfish that made being into computers cool, even though in hindsight these movies were super cheesy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)
- cratermoon 5y agoI'm betting that all of the bandwidth consumed by Napster downloads would look laughably small today. Anyone have some numbers to run?
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoMost of the music on Napster was 128 kbps. Apple TV+ streams video at 40 Mbps. I have no idea what this means in terms of numbers, but the fact that streaming video is so common today and was virtually non-existent back then means the bandwidth consumption of the average household is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater now.